New planet hot-Neptune discovered

By analyzing archival radial velocity data, astronomers have discovered a new strange world with hot Neptune. The newly discovered exoplanet, designated HD 183579b (or TOI-1055b), is about three and a half times larger and nearly 20 times more massive than Earth. The finding is set out in an article published on the arXiv on 28 January. pre-pressure storage.

Although thousands of new exoplanets have been found using the transit method, this technique has one major weakness – a planetary transit can be caused by numerous false positives. Therefore, astronomers also perform radial velocity (RV) measurements to confirm the planetary nature of a transit signal.

To that end, a team of researchers led by Skyler Palatnick of the University of Pennsylvania at Philadelphia analyzed archival RV surveys over the past two decades from the northern and southern skies. They have now confirmed one of the candidate exoplanets. This is an object first spotted by NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which received the designation TOI-1055b (TESS Objects of Interest).

“One shows an RV signature with the correct period and phase corresponding to the transiting planetary candidates with a probability of false alarm of less than 1%. After further investigations we utilize this fact to HD 183579b (TOI-1055b ) to confirm, “the astronomers wrote in the newspaper.

HD 183579b appears to have a radius of about 3.55 Earth’s rays and is about 19.7 times more massive than our planet. It orbits its host every 17.47 days at a distance of about 0.13 AU from there. The planet’s temperature is estimated at 769 K. All in all, the parameters of HD 183579b enabled the researchers to classify it as a so-called ‘hot Neptune’.

The parent star HD 183579 is a bright solar analogue of the spectral type G2V. It is only three percent more massive than the sun and has a radius of about 0.985 sunbeams. The star is about 2.6 billion years old, has an effective temperature of 5,788 K and a metal at a level of about -0.023. The planetary system is located about 186 light-years away in the Telescopium constellation.

Due to its small size and excellent observability, HD 183579b is one of the most accessible small transit planets for future atmospheric characterization. This can be done through space observations such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST).

According to the astronomers, their study shows how important it can be to examine archival datasets to confirm the planetary status of some objects.

“Our work emphasizes that the plan to confirm and even accurately measure the masses of new candidates traveling through the planet does not always depend on obtaining new observations – that in some cases these tasks can be completed with existing data. , “concluded the authors of the article.

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